Producers: David Heyman and David Barron
Director: David Yates
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Michael Gambon, Jim Broadbent, Alan Rickman, Tom Felton and Helen McCrory
Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel
Music: Nicholas Hooper, Themes and John Williams
Harry Potter's sixth year at Hogwarts turns out to be quite an exciting year. First off is the arrival of a new teacher at Hogwarts, Horace Slughorn. Next, Harry obtains a Potions book which used to belong to the very mysterious Half-Blood Prince. Harry finds that the Half-Blood Prince's ancient scribbles are written along the margins of almost every page, giving Harry advice on how to improve greatly on his Potions work, and also teaching him a few helpful (and dangerous) spells along the way. Amidst this, Harry is starting private lessons with Professor Dumbledore, during which Harry learns the dark secrets of Voldemort's past, hoping that they could use these secrets to find a way to defeat him. Harry's year gets even more stressful with the suspicious actions of Draco Malfoy, who has been sneaking around the school doing, so Harry assumes, Voldemort's bidding. Harry quickly becomes determined, and slightly obsessed, to find out exactly what Malfoy has been up to. Yet, during this time, Harry and his friends go through daily life, busy with school work, Quidditch and, of course, romance. Ron has found a new girlfriend, Lavender Brown and Hermione is not happy about it. Ron and Hermione's friendship takes a toll throughout the school year and Harry, as usual, is stuck in the middle. Harry, meanwhile, is facing a romantic dilemma of his own: he realizes he is falling for his best friend's sister, Ginny Weasley, who is dating Harry's classmate, Dean Thomas. Harry's pining for Ginny and Ron's hilarious relationship with Lavender give this story a large dose of reality. Throughout all the school drama, however, the obvious darkness of Voldemort's impending rise to power is always apparent. The climax proves that you shouldn't trust everybody who you think is good and also proves that not everyone can manage to survive.
Our cast are just getting that little bit older now and the hormones are starting to fly. For me it marks a real transition point between our cast as children and our cast as adults. We're working at the moment on Deathly Hallows, and I think we're all aware that this great juggernaut is reaching the end of its journey in a way. But we will be back with part two - Deathly Hallows. I think the cast are getting better and better and Emma certainly seems much more confident this time. She really moved on in the last one, but now she’s even more at ease. And Dan, having done Equus, he’s just finding moments and beats that are really surprising and lovely. It’s all about sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. Okay, maybe we should take the drugs out. Really, this film is more sex, potions and rock n’ roll; but there are all these wonderful things in our story.
